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This Made Me Think: Debt - The First 5000 Years
Disclaimer: I'm not necessarily in a position to write the post I want to write about Debt. I read it as a 20-hour audiobook while driving from Louisiana to DC, and there were several points where I wanted to hit pause and stare off into space thinking about it for a while, but was driving and didn't try to negotiate my visually-based MP3 player interface, and then he said something else really interesting that I would have liked 10 minutes to process... Not to mention that I'm not in a position to double-check any of what he wrote. I'm planning to reread in hard copy as soon as possible. Which is not something I normally say about 20-hour audiobooks. Onward.
This is one of those centrally interesting books that not only deliberately intends to entirely reshape your worldview, but is worthy of doing so. 1491, and to a lesser extent 1493, both fall into this category. Unlike those, Debt is written from a foundation of a recognizable modern political perspective, one related to Occupy and the related anti-globalization protests (though as it points out the "anti-globalization" movement is entirely mislabeled). Having some sympathy with those movements myself, I spent the whole book on the edge of hair-trigger skepticism whenever David Graeber came near them. For the most part, though, the book is nuanced, thoughtful, and deeply embedded in real economic history.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky's lovely review, much more thorough than this one, gives several examples--places where he tears apart economic myths through reference to anthropology.
( Read more... )
This is one of those centrally interesting books that not only deliberately intends to entirely reshape your worldview, but is worthy of doing so. 1491, and to a lesser extent 1493, both fall into this category. Unlike those, Debt is written from a foundation of a recognizable modern political perspective, one related to Occupy and the related anti-globalization protests (though as it points out the "anti-globalization" movement is entirely mislabeled). Having some sympathy with those movements myself, I spent the whole book on the edge of hair-trigger skepticism whenever David Graeber came near them. For the most part, though, the book is nuanced, thoughtful, and deeply embedded in real economic history.
papersky's lovely review, much more thorough than this one, gives several examples--places where he tears apart economic myths through reference to anthropology. ( Read more... )